SEO 101: Questions From Our Press Release Optimization Webinar

For this edition of SEO Tip Jar I culled some questions from last week’s webinar on Press Release SEO presented by Alison MacDonald, Raschanda Hall and yours truly. We’ve held this webinar a few times now, and some questions keep coming up. In that vein, I thought I’d start a mini-series answering your basic press release SEO questions. Here we go!

What does it mean to optimize your press release headline?

When you are talking about search engines and your press release, optimizing headlines means incorporating your most important keywords. Keywords being the words or phrases you’d like to rank well for in search engines. This is not a simple task, as your headline should also be compelling to your target audience and convey the content of the release.

Since search engines heavily factor page titles when determining rankings, optimizing the headline is the single most important task within press release optimization.

What is a deep link?

A deep link is a link, be it on a press release, blog post or webpage, to somewhere other than your company’s homepage. For example, a link to Business Wire’s webinar archive rather than homepage. Typically, your homepage will receive the lion’s share of links and highest search ranking for broadly relevant terms, but it’s important to link to pages within your site to help unlock their ranking potential. These pages often address specific audiences.

What and where is the title tag?

The Title tag is part of the HTML code that makes up a webpage. Depending on the browser you are using, you’ll often see the Title in action on the top of your browser or tab window. The title tag is also used when displaying webpages in search results.

Don’t fret. You don’t need to know HTML to add a Title tag to your press release. Your headline will become your press release’s title and is automatically inserted into the Title tag.

What does SERP stand for?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page of results served up by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing when you search for something. It is typically composed of both organic and paid search results, as illustrated below with an image from Google’s SEO guide (pdf).

What is rich text?

In the context of online press releases, rich text is copy within your press releases that is formatted with styling such as bold or italics.

How many words should comprise my press release headline?

There is no hard limit for the number of words in your headline, but if getting into Google News is a priority, you should make sure headlines contain fewer than 23 words to be within Google News’ guidelines. In addition, Google SERPs often limit titles displayed to roughly 67 characters, so you should limit your headline 67 letters and spaces if at all possible.

That’s it for now. Please let me know via comments, e-mail or Twitter if there’s any questions you’d like answered.